The Charlotte Cafe in the Park Road Shopping Center will reopen in late July after a fire in December caused $35,000 in damage. Davie Hinshawdhinshaw@charlotteobserver.com

The Charlotte Cafe in the Park Road Shopping Center will reopen in late July after a fire in December caused $35,000 in damage. Davie Hinshawdhinshaw@charlotteobserver.com

The Charlotte Cafe in Park Road Shopping Center will reopen in late July after being closed since early December, when a kitchen fire caused $35,000 in damage.

Owner Jimmy Roupas said it’s taken a while to bring the restaurant back up to code and to get the proper permitting from the city and county.

“It just takes a long time. A lot longer than we wanted, anyway,” Roupas said.

Charlotte Cafe, which Roupas opened in 1981, is one of the oldest businesses in the landmark Park Road complex, which opened in 1956 as Charlotte’s first open-air retail center. Edens, a Columbia-based developer, bought the shopping center in 2011 for $82 million.

The company, Roupas said, was “having difficulty working something out with the mortgage company.”

“Once we filed, they came back and said we could work it out, so we didn’t have to go through the bankruptcy,” Roupas said. He added that the fire had nothing to do with the decision to file for bankruptcy.

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